Picked up a 12 core and an 8 core with 64gb ram, both with d700 GPUs for a steal (150 each). Was thinking of running the 12 core as a server and maybe another as a dedicated router running pfsense and connecting a thunderbolt raid array for local media and jellyfin? Havent done any home server/homelab stuff before so was wondering if there were any Mac server things worth running or if I should just format them to run Ubuntu or something.
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Echoing that power concern… if it’s just for home lab file server use there are more efficient choices. I’ve been running a Samba file server (Ubuntu 22.04) on an old Lenovo M93p machine with good results - at somewhere around a 10th of the power consumed by that Mac Pro. Seems like a those machines would be good for animation work.
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Good point, it was too tempting to consider. Running a m1 or m2 mini seems like a better idea, but the allure of that much hardware for the price was too much to pass up
finding a server usecase that would justify the consumption is going to be a challenge, when most home server task can run on a pi